Google Analytics Goals & Bounce Rate

Proper configuration of Goals in Google Analytics is a critical to the ability to make good business decisions. Especially for those of you out there spending money on PPC, in order to make the best return on investment possible (and stop wasting your money), properly set up goals are a must.

In my humble opinion, Conversion Rate and Bounce Rate are two of the most important key performance indicators (KPIs). As you can see below, when I configured Goal Conversions for a client, I was able to make the types of decisions necessary in their PPC account to drive conversions up and bounce rate down.

BEFORE –> 50.19% Bounce Rate | No Conversion Tracking.

Bounce Rate Before

AFTER –>38.73% Bounce Rate | 2.28% Conversion Rate

Bounce Rate After

As you can see, I was able to take the bounce rate down almost 12 percentage points. This is significantly lower than the benchmark for sites of similar size. Check out the stats for last week’s traffic.

Bounce Rate Benchmark

The major improvements in online performance were mostly do to looking at which campaigns were working and which weren’t. While bounce rate is a very important metric, I would not have felt comfortable making such bold changes to the PPC spend without knowing the conversion rate.

Comparing Campaigns | Conversion Rate

Where would you want to put your money?

Another extremely useful place to look at in Google Analytics is the Map Overlay. The Map Overlay allows you to look at Bounce Rate and Conversion Rate by location (of course, in addition to other valuable metrics).

This particular client was spending close to 25% of their PPC budget for ads in the UK.

Conversion Rate by Country

Yuch! But before I decided to pause the ads in England, I applied an Advanced Segment that allows me to see the performance of all visitors who didn’t bounce. Just wanted to make sure that I knew about the behavior of the Brits who did stay on the site.

Conversion Rate by Country | No Bounce

Also pretty bad… Guess who isn’t advertising in England anymore?

Thankfully, looking at these metrics smartly has allowed this client to save significant money and improve their ROI.

In any case, I found the relationship between conversion rate and bounce rate to be interesting. I hope you did too.